"You know, a lot of your loyal fans, Mr. lVlajority Leader, say, That has a nice ring to it, but they like 'President DeLa ' You interested?" As Fox News has pulled farther away ffom the cable competition in the rat- ings race, no one piles up higher ratings than-or outshouts-Bill O'Reill)) who announces that his program is a "no-spin wne."When I met with him recently, in his office on the seventeenth floor of the News Corp. building, O'Reilly, who is six feet four, was sitting at a small desk cluttered with clippings and research material. Besides his weeknight Fox pro- gram, he has a syndicated radio show and a newspaper column. He sees him- self as a victim of stereotype, surrounded by a press corps that is seventy per cent hostile and "vicious." O'Reilly delights in deprecating the "élite" press. "These peo- ple, not only in the print press but other network people, and some powerful people in board rooms, are basically ffightened of the Fox News channel," he said. "They understand that the power has shIfted into an organization that is right center." O'Reilly did a little spinning him- self when I asked if he was often rude on the air. "If you count the times I've shouted in the last six months-maybe ten," he said. He turned the question around: "I have six minutes per segment. If you don't answer the question, I think th ' d " ats ru e. Asked why Fox does so well, O'Reilly had a ready answer: "Because we're dar- ing. Because we're entertaining and in- teresting and different-stimulating." The other networks, he went on, are "too timid and hide-behind-'CNN: We're the journalists.' Oh, bullshit." O'Reilly called Connie Chung's cancelled pro- gram "a tabloid show that rivals what I did at 'Inside Edition'-I mean, we were tougher, we did investigative stuff on 'Inside Edition.' " O'Reilly says that Fox owes much to Ailes. "Roger Ailes is the general, and the general sets the tone of the arm Our army is very George Pattonesque. We charge. We roll. The other armies that we're competing against are very Omar Bradleyesque. They're defensive players. They're cautious. They don't go into uncharted territories. They don't outflank. They play it the way it's been played for forty years. Those days are over." O'Reilly did not spin Advertis- ing Age. Asked whether a more accurate tag line for Fox might be "We report. T% decide," he replied, "Well, you're proba- bly right." R oger Eugene Ailes, who was born on May 15, 1940, comes from Warren, Ohio, a tiny factory town near Youngstown. He was one of three chil- dren, with an older brother and a youn- ger sister. His father worked at first as a laborer at Packard Electric, which made wiring for General Motors; his mother was a housewife who embroidered hand- kerchiefs and dispatched Roger, at age ten, to sell them door to door. During high school and college, Roger worked summers for the state highway depart- ment, sometimes digging ditches. His mother would tell him, he remembers, " 'You always have to have goals.' My mother in some ways was sort of dif- ficult. Because my brother was such a good student, she was always on my ass because I didn't love school. If I got a B, she'd say, 'Why didn't you get an A?' . . . If I got an A-plus, she'd say, 'Did you get the highest grade in the class?' You couldn't please her." He adds, "My mother would have been a C.E.O. of a corporation in today's world." When Roger was eight, he was hit by a car and hospitalized. During his convalescence, he had to learn to use his legs again. His father would take him to a track to practice. Once, he fell and landed in a pile of horse manure. His father had no patience. "Don't fall down and you won't get that crap on you!" he said. Roger has another vivid boyhood memory of his father. "I used to see college boys"-he spits out the words-"give my dad orders in the shop in an inappropriate manner." He once asked his father why he let them talk to him like that. Mter a long pause, his father said, "Son, because of you, your brother, and your sister. I need the job, and you kids have got to go to col- lege so you don't ever have to put up with this." Roger enrolled at Ohio University, in Athens. He spent four years at the college radio station, as a disk jockey and a sportscaster, and dreamed of making a living that wa He was nineteen when his parents telephoned to announce that they were getting a divorce. It was abrupt. "I went home and everything " h . d " M h ' was gone, e Sill. youse wasn t there. My room wasn't there. My stuff wasn't there. . . . I never found my shit!" He rarely went home on holidays or in the summer, volunteering to work "the holiday shifts" at school His mother soon moved to San Francisco and re- married. His father eventually remar- ried, too. Roger talked to his parents on the phone but lost touch with his home town. "Their attitude was, when you get to be eighteen, you go to college and you're on your own," Ailes said matter- of-factl Around the time of his parents' divorce, he married a classmate, a mar- riage that lasted fifteen years. When Ailes was a senior, he had a job interview with the program man- ager of a Cleveland television station. The manager, Chet Collier, remembers him as a slender, self-confident young man. "I was impressed with his enthusi- asm, his willingness to think in different ways," Collier recalls. Collier was help- ing to launch a local talk-variety show, "The Mike Douglas Show," on KYW- TV, and hired Roger as a production assistant at sixty-four dollars a week. The show caught on, and was soon syndicated national1 One of Roger's chores was to meet guests at the air- port-celebrities like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Pearl Bailey-and drive them to the studio. Soon he was writing the cue cards for Douglas, which was much the same as posing the questions. Collier now works ffom his home in Florida but remains close to Ailes; he was the second person Ailes recruited to devise programming for America's Talking, and was a key programmer at Fox News. "Standing there, he looked like most people," Collier recalls. "Then he talked, and he got you excited." Some- times Ailes got too excited. Once, he threw a bullying advertiser off the load- ing dock into the snow. And, once he slammed the executive producer up against a wall. In both cases, Ailes says, he erupted because someone "had abused little people." To this day, he says, he follows this code: "Don't mis- treat people who work for you." (He doesn't always follow it, observes a Fox executive who knows him well. "He can be really mean. . . . He yells at 'little people' unnecessaril ") Three years after Collier hired him, Ailes became the THE NEW YOR.KER., MAY 26, 2003 65